Cities cannot easily be "redesigned". Infrastructure exists and you can't just refactor neighborhoods like software.
Autonomous vehicles are an enormous market and well worth the investment.
Autonomous vehicles are an enormous market and well worth the investment.
What's a superblock in Houston gonna do?
It’s the “MVP” of city design. :)
But it has been done. It’s a matter of will. Not saying it’s de facto a good idea. But cities can be refactored. See : Haussmann.
Are you from the US? I find the kind of passive statement about the state of systems prevalent here. ( be it public transportation, internet infrastructure, political framework )
I start to doubt the capacity of this country to adapt.
(The common story is they were bought up and shut down by car companies, but that's a myth afaik.)
Tell that to Jersey City:
Transport infrastructure in cities absolutely can be redesigned quickly, if you’re willing to take a quick and dirty approach in the short term. Which is usually enough when it comes to influencing people’s behavior; it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be functional and feel safe.
In places with good bicycle infrastructure like the Netherlands pretty much everyone cycles (93% cycle at least once per week). In fact the mode share for bicycles is lowest in the 30-40 age range with the 2nd highest being 65 and up - highest is under 18. The biggest use for cycling is shopping (22%). http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/who-cycles-in-n...
https://www.6sqft.com/before-after-10-nyc-blocks-and-enclave...
and a few more examples here, with the designer talking about the process:
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/wired-news-and-science-str...
Self driving cars just feels like a bunch of engineers wanting to solve a really hard and really interesting problem. But is it really the right problem to solve? I don’t think so. Currently we have:
>other unpredictable human-driven vehicles on the road
>no sensors or passive/active guides in the physical infrastructure — guidance is completely determined onboard
>no signage designed for CV — everything written in plain English, so you have to waste compute on object detection and OCR. And, you have a constant and unending need to collect mapping data
>no vehicle-to-vehicle communication whatsoever
Design the roads and signage for self driving cars, enforce an industry-wide V2V standard with NHTSA, and start small in some test areas that only allow other vehicles that are part of the botnet (perhaps not necessarily self-driving, but at least part of the V2V network). That’s a reasonable problem space. The current one is unworkable — the models won’t converge and they’ll never make it out of “beta”.